In 2016, pop superstar Beyoncé released Lemonade, a genre-spanning album that broke records and han a profound cultural impact. While it is is one of Beyoncé’s most critically reviewed albums, Lemonade also gained traction due to the tantalising drama of her husband, rapper and producer Jay-Z, cheating on her. In the accomplanying visual album, Beyoncé smashes cars to the tune of “Hold Up”, in celebratory protest of Jay-Z’s infidelity.
One year later, Jay-Z released 4:44, a spiritual response via album that features Beyoncé as a collaborator. The album openly addresses the rapper’s infidelity, and serves as an symoblic promise to his wife. If only all couples could settle their issues in the recording studio…
For both artists, the two albums mark a concise shift to new styles compared to the rest of their work, thematically, artistically and musically. But what about statistically? Our project works to quantify and qualify the relationship between these two icons by means of a statistical analysis their discography.
Here are the various sources of our data:
genius packagespotifyr package, which pull from Spotify’s API in bulkFor the text analysis of the lyrics, our key questions of interest were: How do the lyrics of Beyoncé songs differ from Lemonade? How do the lyrics of Jay-Z songs differ from 4:44? But, progressing into our analysis, we quickly realised that text analysis is not entirely appropriate to songs, nor is particularly insightful for either of these artists. So, the analysis took on a different purpose: what information can be gleaned, at all, from a text analysis of Beyoncé and Jay-Z songs, and Lemonade and 4:44? And what information is lost in a text analysis?
Beyoncé is up first. The two visualisations below show the 20 most frequent words across Beyoncé’s discography and in Lemonade specifically.
There are not many significant differences between Lemonade and her complete discography. Moreover, the nature of Beyoncé’s musicality is a confounding variable which informs which words are most frequent, more than “theme” does. Most of her songs repeat a central word or phrases. The song “Run the World (Girls)” is a prime example. The song repeats the title phrase 32 times; the words “run”, “world” and “girls” are all in the top 10 words of Beyoncé’s discography.
The same is true for Lemonade. While freedom is a central theme of the album, it is high on the frequency list largely in part due to the song “Freedom (ft. Kendrick Lamar)”, which contains the word “freedom” 21 times. Largely, this confounding issue exposes a fundamental issue with using text analysis on songs: the meaning of a song is not necessarily in the lyrics, but in the music.
Because of the issue with pattern repetition in Beyoncé’s music, other text analysis methods – like a focus on bigrams and measures of tf or tf-idf were not applicable.
However, beyond the fundamental restrictions of using text analysis of music, it is clear that “love” is a central theme of Beyoncé’s music. It is the most frequent word across Beyoncé’s discography and in Lemonade specifically. Of course, the word suffers from the same issue as in “Run the World (Girls)” and “Freedom (ft. Kendrick Lamar)”. “Love” is in the central pattern of a number of her songs, including “Love on Top”, “Crazy in Love (feat. Jay-Z)” – two of her most well known songs – and in “Love Drought” in Lemonade. In this case, we are less concerned with the confounding impact of the song pattern, because the word “love” appears in the central pattern of multiple songs, as well as smaller instances in other songs. Female empowerment is another theme visible in the word frequency visualisations.
There are many themes central to Beyoncé’s discography and to Lemonade that do not appear in the word frequency visualisations. Most notably, her focus on pride and reclaiming of her Black heritage is not visible. This theme can be readily interpreted from the music and visual accompaniments of Lemonade. Text analysis does not offer us the full picture, in this instance.
Next up is Jay-Z. The two visualisations below show the 20 most frequent words across Jay-Z’s discography and in 4:44 specifically.
Before addressing the differences between the two, it is important to acknowledge the presence of stop words in the visualisations. Early in the wrangling process, we removed stop words using the stop_words dataset built into R. And yet, 8 of the 20 most frequent words in Jay-Z songs are stop words, vocalisations like “uh” and exclamations like “yeah”. The default stop words package seems to have an inflexible range. Maybe, words like “y’all” provide a cultural context, so are not removed. More likely, the stop word dataset is intended for literatum not music. Still, the implications of such a specification makes the cultural center of their text analysis eurocentric.
Both summaries of Jay-Z songs also show that his songs contain many expletives. This is noteworthy compared to Beyoncé, who does not often use curse words. But, we cannot necessarily prescribe a difference in theme or meaning from this text analysis. Instead, the confounding variable is that their music belongs to different genres. Beyoncé is not a rap artist; Jay-Z is. Within the framework of rap, a field of literature with a developing body of work, I question whether these expletives are stop words or not. Certainly, in comparison with other genres of music, they are exceptional. But, in comparison with other rap music, this is not particularly noteworthy. The n-word also has a unique cultural role in rap music that the visualisation reflects. The n-word and the plural are the two most frequent words in Jay-Z’s music. Again, I do not attribute this to Jay-Z in particular, but to the genre of rap.
And, just like with Beyoncé’s songs, text analysis is uniquely inadequate for rap music. The meaning, style and emotion conveyed lie in the sound.
Regardless of these restrictions, looking past the stop words in the reference of rap music, differences between the set and subset of Jay-Z’s music appear. 4:44, compared to all Jay-Z songs, touches on themes related to Jay-Z’s infamous infidelity: “family” and “legacy”. Just like with Beyoncé’s music, however, such an ascription is faulty; the song “Legacy” in 4:44 contains “legacy” 16 times.
And, similarly to Beyoncé, Jay-Z’s most frequent word of meaning is “love”. These two artists, despite having vastly different styles and belonging to different genres of music, still base their music on the same central theme. And, despite the narrative of struggling with infidelity that both Lemonade and 4:44 grapple with, they are both still about love.
For the charts analysis of the albums, we wanted to know how the evolution of chart performance for two halves of the biggest musical duo in the world. How do their chart performances compare to each other and is there a moment of synchrony for both Lemonade and 4:44? Progressing into our analysis, we found that Beyoncé performs better on the charts and that despite the artists’ dynamite success in the last 10 years, the chart performances fail to reflect that. So what caused this to happen?
Something we can easily see from this chart is that Beyoncé fares better in album performance. While Beyoncé is indeed a superstar, her success could be attributed to her pop genre music and previous work in Destiny’s Child. Beyoncé is a singer, in a much more mainstream and commercialized genre of music than Jay Z is. Even though Jay Z may not seem to be as successful in album sales as Beyoncé, he is a rapper. Hip-hop has not been treated in the same mainstream regard as pop music has been.
Beyoncé’s albums have always fared well. All 6 of her studio albums are chart toppers. One thing to note is that while this visualization might indicate that Beyoncé hasn’t made it big since I am Sasha Fierce, that is untrue. Beyoncé has only become more popular and more critically acclaimed. Lemonade is Beyoncé’s most critically acclaimed album. It is the introduction of her own streaming service, Tidal, which distorted the chart performance of her latest studio album, Lemonade. Because Tidal is a much smaller and more niche market, the success of her album may not be fully depicted in these charts.
This visualization shows the evolution of Jay Z’s chart performance. While Jay Z has followed an upward trend, we note that this is not reflective of his success and fame. As a hip-hop artist, Jay Z does not fare well against pop music counterparts, especially because hip-hop has only entered the mainstream in recent years. Another thing to note is that Jay Z almost exclusively released his music on his own streaming service, Tidal. He just released his discography on Spotify and Apple Music years later. This might affect how well his album performs on charts, despite his immense popularity.
As a disclaimer, album sales are difficult to assess during the streaming era. The below sales numbers are all pulled from Billboard, and they reflect U.S. sales only. All Jay-Z sales below are as of June 2018, and the below numbers reflect streaming numbers converted to physical sales, where 1250 streams equates to 1 album sale. All Beyoncé sales are as of December 2016 except for Lemonade, which is pulled from January 2017.
Both artists peaked early in their career, with Jay-Z’s third album Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life representing a career high, and Beyoncé’s first album Dangerously in Love reflecting her highest single album sales. Naturally, album sales are biased toward older albums, as they have been available to consumers for longer, explaining the negative trend for both artists. Both artists had mid-career resurgence albums. For Jay-Z, it was 2003’s The Black Album, and for Beyonce, it was 2013’s Beyoncé. The Carters’ most recent releases both present challenges in evaluation. Jay-Z’s commitment to the less-used Tidal streaming service hurt his adjusted sales for 2017’s 4:44, the lowest selling album of his career. Lemonade was initially released as a visual album on Tidal, not being added to Spotify or Apple Music until years later (not reflected in these sales), and the album had been available for less than a year. To put it in perspective, Lemonade broke 485,000 adjusted sales in its first week, bolstered by 115 million Tidal streams, a record high streaming number for a female artist.
A statistic called valence exists in Spotify’s API, reflecting the “musical positivity” conveyed by a song. Higher valence numbers correspond to more positive sound, while lower valence numbers correspond to more negative sound. Valence is measured on a scale from 0 to 1, and the plots essentially reflect the density of an album in terms of different valence numbers. 
Examining Jay-Z’s career discography, a general trend exists of higher valence peaks early in his career. As his career has progressed, the albums are generally more balanced across the valence spectrum, with less dramatic peaks.
Beyonce’s plots have been more balanced throughout the valence spectrum throughout her career, with peaks usually occurring near the middle. Unsurprising since it covers themes of adultery, Lemonade has considerably fewer tracks in the high valence end of the spectrum and a far greater fraction of tracks near 0 than Beyonce’s other studio albums. Important to note, Beyoncé’s eponymous album is omitted from this plot, as it was not available with Spotify’s API statistics.
Overall, we found a downward trend in sales performances for both artists, a steady trend in chart performance for Beyoncé, and an upward trend in chart performances for Jay-Z. However, we have three things to note. As mentioned, sales data is extremely difficult to acquire in the streaming age. Chart data functions in the same way. With the use of Tidal as a streaming service and album release platform for both artists, it is difficult to assess through charts and sales data on whether or not the duo is successful.
We say they are. There is an overwhelming number of sources that point to Lemonade being Beyoncé’s most critically acclaimed album, and 4:44 may be Jay-Z’s best reviewed project of the last decade . Since the release of their two respective and connected albums, the pair has released a collaborative album and completed another critically acclaimed world tour. We believe that Jay-Z and Beyoncé have been on the rise and charts and sales data are not complete depictions of how successful they are or will continue to become.
Lastly, we determined that how often a song contains a word or phrase does not provide a good indicator of what an album or body of work is about. We think that a more literary, tailored approach to lyric analysis would provide more insight into the meaning behind the albums. However, it is necessary to consider that Beyoncé and Jay-Z consistently use “love” in all of their music and after using the Spotify API, we found that the duo also uses the same key for most of their songs. In their valence statistics, both artists displayed a similar evolutionary trend throughout their career, where their albums became more balanced in terms of valence. We think that the connection between their commonly used words and musical expressions, despite being artists in two different genres is notable.
A next step would be to conduct further research into text analysis, its shortcomings and biases, and what the best method of analyzing music could be.
At the end of the day, Jay-Z and Beyoncé are the world’s most influential musical couple, which charts and sales cannot fully capture. However, the synchrony between the two artists, both lyrically and musically, further bolsters their legacies and is a major component of their continued success.
Thanks for reading! 